Yara Shahidi – Time’s The 30 Most Influential Teens of 2016

As an actress of African-American and Iranian-American heritage playing a smart, complicated teenager on a popular TV show, Shahidi knows she’s breaking boundaries: black-ish’s Zoey, she has said, “is my activism through art.” But Shahidi, who recently appeared on the cover of Essence, has also become an activist in real life, using her newfound fame to push for more representation and diversity in Hollywood. “If a child grows up never seeing themselves represented as successful or as the hero,” she said in July, “then they are the anomaly if they succeed and the expectation if they fail.” —Daniel D’Addario